


a happy ending

by maketea



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Comfort, Episode: s03 Chat Blanc, F/M, Falling In Love, Light Angst, Sad with a Happy Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-23
Updated: 2020-08-23
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:42:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26072077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maketea/pseuds/maketea
Summary: ladybug and chat noir have five minutes to talk after she deakumatizes him.
Relationships: Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir/Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug
Comments: 56
Kudos: 376





	a happy ending

**Author's Note:**

> i really like this fic ;_;

"How did you win me over?"

Chat Noir smiled sadly. "You know I can't tell you that, Bugaboo."

Ladybug looked down at the expanse of water beneath her feet. "Yeah."

They lapsed back into silence — which she wasn't sure how he could bear to do, considering the five-minute time limit Bunnix had put to their conversation. 

Silent like this, with Chat Noir no longer Blanc but  _ Noir _ — her partner, her best friend, and apparently, at some point in time, the love of her life — the white city almost looked beautiful. It reminded her of winter patrols, with the chill in the air and Chat Noir's warm arm, like a gentle reminder of his presence, pressed to hers.

She wanted to put her head on his shoulder, but didn't. Maybe she should have. Maybe he would have appreciated for this version of reality — a reality where only he and the drowned city of love existed — to be erased with the feeling of her touch.

"How long do we have?" he asked.

"Four minutes." She didn't mention the fact that, while she flicked her yo-yo open and closed, she had had an eye on the time.

Another silence settled over them. 

She felt ungrateful for wasting their five minutes with silence. Ladybug wanted to talk — she wanted to ask about him, about  _ them _ , about how they were, how they  _ loved _ . But if Bunnix had been hesitant to allow Chat Noir five minutes with Ladybug before the timeline reset, any of those questions being answered would make her  _ furious _ .

"Can you tell me about yourself, Marinette?" he asked.

She started. It still sent a shock through her whenever he called her that. 

"Me?" she said. "What's there to say about me? You already know most of it, right?"

"I know, I just…" He struggled. "Please?"

Ladybug pursed her lips. 

"How's designing going?" he asked. "Have you made anything new?"

"Oh— yeah, actually. I finished a beret this morning. It's the second one I've ever made." 

_ Adrien.  _ How did Adrien fit into all of this? Were they still close, after she and Chat Noir fell in love? Did Adrien know civilian Chat Noir? Did  _ Marinette  _ know civilian Chat Noir?

"A beret?" he said. "For yourself?"

"No, it's for…" She swallowed. "The guy that I'm… well, you probably know."

He smiled. "Yeah. I do."

How had he done it? How had Chat Noir doused that fire in her for Adrien, and lit it with his own flame?

She turned, then, to watch his profile. He had his head tilted back and eyes up to the sky. She knew he knew she was watching him, but, unlike how she was used to, he didn't catch her gaze and grin. Didn't tease her for checking him out, or something equally as silly. There was a serenity in his face that made her chest ache, a soft sadness that looked, like the white city, almost beautiful.

Ladybug turned away, blushing.

"How are things with Adrien?" he asked.

She spluttered. "A-Adrien?"

"Yeah."

The heat boiled from her face to the collar of her suit. "He's— I mean, well, he's a great friend."

Chat Noir raised an eyebrow. "A 'friend', huh?"

Ladybug, mouth clamped shut, nodded.

A smile played on his lips. "His words, or yours?"

She sighed. "I don't know why I'm so embarrassed to tell you this. You know already, anyway."

"That I do." He laughed. "Do you love him?"

"I think so."

"'Think'?"

"Yeah." 

Unlike him, Ladybug felt odd being watched — even if it was just Chat Noir. She pulled her knees up to her chest. Perhaps he knew. Perhaps he did it — when they had been in love — to tease her on warm patrol nights between flirting and laughing and kissing and—

"Why 'think'?" he asked. 

"Because—" She tightened her arms around herself. "Because… I don't know. Just this morning I was so sure I was in love with him and him only, but if I could fall for you, too…"

Chat Noir laughed again. He patted her back. "Don't think about it too much."

"Do I stop loving him?"

"You love me and him equally."

"But that's not fair on you," she protested. "I can't imagine dating someone while having feelings for someone else. That's just… not right."

Chat Noir gave her a smile. With a little something behind it, perhaps, but the effect was hampered by the fact he was of the future, and she was not.

"It's much more straightforward than you think," he said. "Maybe it'll make sense later. Maybe not."

"I don't like it when you know something I don't."

He breathed a chuckle. "I know, Marinette."

Ladybug shivered.

He took his hand away from her back. "How long do we have?"

She had almost forgotten about her yo-yo. Ladybug flicked it open. "Two minutes."

"Hmm." 

And their silence bobbed back up to the surface.

This Chat Noir, with all the foresight he had and the cliffhanger exchanges they shared, was definitely beyond how she ever imagined him to turn out. He still had terrible posture when they sat together, and fiddled with his ring in a way that made her nervous, and looked at her like she had hung the stars in the sky. But he didn't grin anymore — or at least he hadn't, so far — and he spoke with a softer timbre, like the silence of a dead city had forced him to hush, too. 

"Does it scare you?" he said. "That this all happened… after we fell in love?"

Ladybug fiddled with her yo-yo in thought.

Out there, a few skyscraper heads away, would be the François Dupont. Perhaps the windows had burst open from the water pressure, and the classrooms had marker pens and glass shards buried under the desks. Maybe the wheely chair Mlle Bustier sat in would be upturned, its carcass lying on its side in front of the whiteboard where she used to write their homework assignments for the next week.

Perhaps she was standing there, still. A sculpture of solid ashes. Handouts freshly printed in her hand, but all in vain.

Ladybug's stomach twisted.

"It doesn't scare me, exactly," she said. "It just doesn't make sense."

"What do you mean?"

"We're good people, Chat Noir, and, if we decided to fall in love, we deserved to do that happily." She flicked her yo-yo back open. Three minutes. "You are made of kindness. And… even if I make mistakes, I know I'm a good enough person to really have something beautiful with someone like you. Not…"

She looked from his warm green eyes to the skyscrapers up to their top storeys with water. Ladybug shuddered.

“It makes me sad,” she said, “that something like this could happen… just because we fell in love.”

“It wasn’t because we fell in love.”

Ladybug snapped her eyes to him.

For the first time in their five minutes, he avoided her gaze. Chat Noir fiddled with his ring, the backs of his boots knocking against the tower.

“I can’t tell you what happened,” he said tightly, “but it wasn’t because we fell in love.”

“But then…”

“You said it yourself, My Lady. We’re good people.” He let go of his ring, reached over, and squeezed her knuckles. “Good people like us have happy endings.”

“What’ll be your happy ending?” she said. Her throat felt swollen, and she struggled to take in the deep breath she needed to face him. “I’ll get to go back and make everything right, but what about you?”

His expression flickered. “This is my ending, Marinette,” he whispered. “And I’m spending it with you. I’m the happiest that I could be.”

Sometimes, Chat Noir made jokes she didn’t like. When she leaned against him after a long battle and he told her that, if he died then and there, he’d die happy, Ladybug would bristle. Would tell him not to talk like that. And he would laugh, helping her to her feet, and tease her for getting so worked up.

“You think I’d leave you like that, Bugaboo?” he’d say, tweaking her nose to wind her up all the more. “You think you can get rid of me? You know what they say about feeding strays."

The tears boiled over and dripped off her jaw, and she held Chat Noir's gaze through it all, watching the reflection of the white city in his eyes.

“My Lady,” he said softly, and opened his arms. “Come here, Marinette. I’m sorry.”

She slumped into his embrace, and in that moment — when he cradled her, when she sobbed so hard into his shoulder she worried she’d stop breathing — she wasn’t a superhero anymore. She wasn’t the brave face of Paris that promised little boys and girls watching her fly across the city that everything would be okay. She wasn’t a team leader, wasn’t the polaris of the group that had a plan or fifty up her sleeve. For once, Ladybug had a problem she had no solution to.

She hadn't been prepared to grieve for something that had technically never existed.

“It’s okay,” he soothed. “It’s okay. You’re gonna go back and fix everything and it’ll all be back to normal.”

“But—but you won’t be there,” she said, and covered her mouth on a teary hiccup.

“Hey.” Chat Noir cupped her face and lifted it. “Of course I’ll be there. I’ll be right there waiting for you on the other side of the Burrow. I’m probably doing something stupid right now. Working on a shrine for you, or something.”

That coaxed a wet laugh out of her. “A shrine? Isn’t that a little overboard?”

“Don’t even try and tell me about ‘overboard’. I know you.”

She wiped her eyes with the back of her hands. “Yeah. You do.”

They both dried her cheeks as much as they could, and settled back into each other’s embrace. If they sat like this, her eyes closed and head on his chest, she could pretend they were on a rooftop near the Pont des Arts and resting together after an early-ending patrol. He had a hand on her back and the other by her face, drawing circles with the back of his finger just below her mask in a way that the normal Chat Noir — the Chat Noir of her time — would not be experienced enough to do so naturally. This Chat Noir had had practice, had held her time and time again, had learned how to solve the puzzle that was embracing her on the edge of a rooftop without falling.

She opened her eyes.

But this wasn’t a rooftop. It was the edge of the remains of the Eiffel Tower, and this wasn’t her Chat Noir.

Ladybug untangled herself from him, and reached for her yo-yo.

She deflated. “Forty-five seconds."

“Don’t look so low.” His hand had fallen to her thigh, and it lingered for a moment, before he seemed to remember, just as she had that he wasn’t her Chat Noir, that she wasn’t his Ladybug. It migrated to her shoulder, instead. “Forty-five seconds until you fix everything.”

She bit her lip. “Do you think… one day… I could fall in love with you?”

“Yes, Marinette.” He squeezed her. “I think, when the time is right, we could have a do-over, and go for that happy ending we deserve.”

“You really think so?”

“Yes. If that's what you decide you want." 

His hand on her shoulder twitched. He looked into her eyes, and — oh, he wanted to cup her face again, right?

"I love you," he said — softly, slowly, letting the words sink into her skin in a way they never had done before. It was thick with meaning, with confidence — the  _ I love you _ of someone who had heard it back from her before. "I want you to have your happy ending, even if that means it isn't with me."

She swallowed down another bout of tears and smiled. "I see you never grew out of your martyring tendencies."

He smiled, too. The hand on her shoulder finally made the trip it had been twitching for, and curled under her chin. 

Ladybug closed her eyes. Gently, he tilted up her face, and kissed her forehead. 

"Minibug!"

They sprung away from one another.

Ladybug stumbled to her feet, dusting herself off, a horribly unsubtle flush spreading beneath her mask. "T-time's up?"

Bunnix barely reacted to the kiss she had most definitely seen. "Time's up. Let's go save the world." 

"Okay." Ladybug turned, just before she left, and held her hand out to Chat Noir. "I'm gonna go get that happy ending."

He intertwined their fingers and squeezed. "I can't wait to see it."

✯¸.•´*¨`*•✿ ✿•*`¨*`•.¸✯

Behind her eyelids, the sun sank lower on the horizon. The reds and oranges in her closed eyes descended with the twilight. 

"Chat Noir?"

He stopped humming. "Yes, My Lady?"

She marvelled at how he said it. There was love, of course, but not in the same way as the other Chat Noir. It was sweeter. Lighter.

Simpler. Because it was simpler, now, wasn't it?

Ladybug kept her head on his shoulder. "You know you mean a lot to me, don't you?"

She felt his cheek shift on her hair. "Ah… well, I always hoped so. But it's nice to hear it." He didn't return to his humming right away. "Why, Bugaboo?"

Ladybug took in a deep breath. She smiled. "No reason. I just wanted to let you know."

"So cute." He put his cheek back on her head. "Bugaboo's getting soft on me."

Chat Noir picked his humming back up.

And Ladybug, head on his shoulder, legs dangling off Montparnasse Tower over their city of love, wondered to herself.

Perhaps this could be the beginning of their happy ending.

**Author's Note:**

> tumblr: rosekasa


End file.
